Comment by dalbasal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dalbasal | Hacker News Reader

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Maybe, but "photographers" aren't really a collective... or too loose a collective to have foresight, interests and such.

The credit industry, traditionally, has a cascade of debt collection tiers. Once one tier fails to collect, they'll sell on the debt. The value of the debt (asset, to the collector) decreases drastically as we travel down the tiers. The "quality" of collectors also decreases. Business models that depend on illegal practices, betting on inadequate enforcement. Trial preparations that depend on 99% certainty of defendant not showing up. Most of the debt might be arbitrarily imposed interest and fines to nonresponsive "clients." The lawyer present may not have paperwork, or even know the companies' originally owed.

Financial assets like bad debt portfolios scale and bundle wonderfully, so there's no floor. There are multi-million dollar packages out there selling for $1000. An enterprising individual might take a blind chance. Apply creative means of collecting 1.3% of total debt. Maybe you offer 90% settlements. Maybe impose 500% fees and sell on. Maybe you specialise in deceased estates, acquire high morbidity debtor lists, and use systemic timing to advantge. Maybe you rebunde such that specialists can have a crack.

Anyway... At the copyright trolling end of this game, I'd make a distinction between "photographers," "rights holders" and the "copyright biz." What some shady lawtech startup does to monetize a copyright portfolio owned by their pay-per-performance client... "Photographer" is not really an active category within this structure.

> Once one tier fails to collect, they'll sell on the debt

I think there should be a law stating that if your debt is sold to a third party and you are not offered to settle with the same amount than the third party was paying, the debt should be automatically forgiven. Yep, that would make many loans more difficult to issue, and that would be net good.

Maybe. I mean, it might makes moral sense maybe. IRL, these things play out in unsatisfying ways.

"that would make many loans more difficult to issue"

Maybe in some cases, but I'm broadly skeptical. Selling bad debt is usually not an important part of non-shady businesses models. 2nd order effects, if any, are likely to be the main concern. If a business is known to offer 10% settlements after 2 years... that predictability will eventually be taken advantage of.

Honestly, I think the debt stuff (also aspects of copyright) are just the loose ends of major industries. Most bad debt or long tail IP assets aren't worth much. But if you can bundle, they're never too small to monetize.

Once you have an industry dedicated to squeezing that last drop... you probably have a destructive industry.

IMO, the best solutions is policing. Somehow, policing is rarely mentioned as a solution to corporate crime. That might mean occasionally tweaking laws to help make policing effective... but that only makes sense ifyou are already policing.

I bet these trolls are as sloppy as the victims they're targeting. At least in debt collection, at a certain depth... they're not doing any due diligence. Often, all they have is a name, number and sum. That means they often are collecting on BS premises. Charge them with fraud, or racketeering. A business practice premised on demanding payment of a debt, without proof that the debt is real... that's an extortion racket.

I wonder if the trolls here can stand up to scrutiny. Do they actually own the rights? Have they based their business model on strategic avoidance of due diligence? From what I've heard, IP trolling exists by exploiting liability limits of both corporate law, and practical law enforcement.

> If a business is known to offer 10% settlements after 2 years... that predictability will eventually be taken advantage of.

Yep. And the next order effect is that the business stops selling bad debt and sits on it. And eventually starts thinking more carefully to whom lends money.

Ad I said, I'm skeptical of the more expansive of such expectations. They might just sit on the debt, almost certainly if it's valued below a certain sum.

The chains of effect leading to a useful improvement in lending prudence... long. The opportunities to stray some other way, many. Graveyards are full of wonks that expect a minor policy tweak to fix a problem, rather than just move it around.

Most of these debts are unpaid bills, car payments, etc. Not businesses that specialise in debt. They outsource that part, and that part outsources too. "More prudent" means credit rating standards, or (usually) higher interest rate. That's not doing anything useful, IMO. You still get left with as much or more defaults, lawless collection, etc.

IMO, if when we want to actually deal with something, we drop the grand ideas and operate at the level of the issue we want to affect. Where there are multiple "orders," we want to tightly control the "chain."

Lawlessness in debt collection? Law enforcement. IP trolls abusing the legal system. Make it illegal.

Look... Google, FB and such had IP laws specially tailored to them. Timed and written to shield them from legitimate copyright infringement claims, taking into account their ability to "implement IP" without interfering with their business too much. Where is the law for the person in OP's shoes? It doesn't exist. He has to suffice with the print paradigm that existed before www.

Not-incidentally, the "print paradigm" was tailored for newspapers. That's what fair use is. It's not some abstract concept that happened to work for news. It was designed for them, probably by them. Copyright just isn't designed to work for ordinary people, so once you have incidents like this posts'... the realistic thing to do is avoid being a copyright user at all.

If you want a clever law expected to make debt valued <X% impossible to profitably collect, make it dumb. You probably need an institution of some sort to control that second order, or a willingness to make blanket laws that harm other participants that aren't your target. Consider the RL structure of consumer lending, not a chalkboard model.

Disney, Google, or the think tanks they fund to develop laws... they're certainly looking for a tightly controlled cause-effect chain with built in guarantees.

Most lenders already know how risky a particular loan is. They know the predicted default rate and price the credit accordingly, including the sell-on value. Reducing the sell-on value won't make them "more careful", it will just make them price the credit higher.

That may make the very, very bottom tier of borrowers unable to borrow--maybe--but it doesn't prevent the vast amount of borrowers from getting a loan. It just makes it more expensive.

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